Terry McAuliffe maintained Democrats' digital edge

A year after the 2012 election in which the Obama campaign dominated on data and Republicans wondered how they could catch up, both parties saw 2013 as not only a testing ground for new digital strategies but also a test of how much ground the GOP has made up.

Democratic Gov.-elect Terry McAuliffe’s campaign, building on the foundations of Obama’s 2012 data operation, was able to adapt many of Obama’s data strategies to a state-level race.

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As for the GOP, even though GOP Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s campaign made strides — it created a data platform that could be used by all parts of the campaign — it never made digital a real priority. Ultimately, the candidate’s lack of funding — combined with what GOP digital consultants call a more general lack of attention and resources for digital — kept the Republican candidate from closing the gap with McAuliffe.

“For the first time on a major [GOP] campaign, the digital team had a major seat at the table and was involved in most of the decision making,” said Wesley Donehue, Cuccinelli’s lead digital consultant. “The problem is that you’re still not a top priority, and the spending on the digital side is … still extremely low.”

Take the spending figures on digital. According to data from the Virginia Public Access Project, McAuliffe’s campaign paid its digital advertising agency 13 percent of what it paid for TV and radio expenditures. The corresponding figure for the Cuccinelli campaign was 2.5 percent.

McAuliffe’s data operation was like a miniature version of Obama’s: The campaign teamed up with NGP VAN, the Democratic data giant, to use many of the same types of modeling and targeting strategies that the president used to win a second term last year.

“OFA and the Obama organization was not involved in this race, but what they left over was clearly there,” said Michael Halle, the McAuliffe adviser who managed the campaign’s data team.

The McAuliffe data effort utilized not only many of the same tools and programs that helped Obama win reelection last November but many of the same people. Halle is an alum of Obama’s 2012 campaign, as are McAuliffe digital consultant Andrew Bleeker and other key data staffers.

“When you go from a lot of races [in 2012] to one [in 2013], you get a lot of people who have done this before,” Bleeker said.

The McAuliffe campaign started working on its data operation early this year, not long after the candidate announced he was running. As POLITICO reported, the campaign conducted a 10,000-respondent poll and 10 focus groups starting in February that served as the basis for their modeling throughout the campaign.

Combined with the Virginia voter file, which is managed by the Democratic National Committee and includes information gathered during the 2008 and 2012 elections, McAuliffe’s team was able to quickly create profiles of the types of voters they needed to target most.

“The data that was developed over previous elections was critical,” said Brennan Bilberry, McAuliffe’s communications director. “There’s no question that it provided important guidance, and in a lot of ways what the team here did is refine and improve on it even more.”

For Cuccinelli, a combination of overall campaign money woes and what Donehue called insufficient resources for digital meant that his campaign couldn’t do nearly as much on the data front. Donehue said the campaign was a big step forward in that it gave digital consultants “a seat at the table” — but that it didn’t provide the money the digital effort needed to be effective.

“Cuccinelli just didn’t raise nearly as much money … so when a campaign’s budget gets slashed, it’s not slashed proportionally,” Donehue said. “Most of the money goes to TV, and digital is one of the first things on the chopping block.”

The Cuccinelli camp developed a targeted sharing Facebook app similar to what the Obama campaign did in 2012 and McAuliffe did this year. When supporters downloaded the program, it gave the campaign access to their Facebook friends, whom the campaign could match up with their existing voter file to choose ads best tailored to them.

“We were doing some really, really cool stuff — it’s just we didn’t have the money to capitalize on it,” Donehue said. “It’s like creating the world’s best commercial and then having $10 to put it on TV.”

Patrick Ruffini, president of the GOP digital firm Engage, said he thinks the Republican National Committee has done “a lot” the past year to begin closing the GOP’s digital deficit. But many GOP campaign consultants, he added, still don’t see digital and data as anything more than a “shiny object or a luxury item.”

“Obviously, the Cuccinelli campaign was resource-constrained in their budget, but that does not take away from the fact that as a percentage of the budget, [only] McAuliffe seemed to view digital as a strategic tool,” Ruffini said.

Donehue said the campaign’s data operations were largely handled in-house and in conjunction with the handful of vendors it hired to help out. While the Republican National Committee, which began working on its own data operation with the hire of a new chief technology officer this spring, passed along its voter file to the Cuccinelli campaign, Donehue said the committee was not heavily involved overall in the data operation.

“I don’t think the RNC was in a place yet to where they could be extremely helpful,” he said. “The RNC is heading in the right direction, but they aren’t where they would have needed to have been to be effective for Cuccinelli.”

He and Ruffini stressed that they think the RNC is making strides and will soon be poised to provide significant help to state-level campaigns.

Zac Moffatt, co-founder of the GOP firm Targeted Victory and Mitt Romney’s 2012 digital director, said many Republican consultants don’t fully respect digital — and demonstrated it by their unwillingness to take money out of the traditional TV budget to fund it — and that certainly played a role in the Cuccinelli campaign.

Looking toward 2014, McAuliffe digital and data strategists say their race is a prelude for the things Democratic campaigns will be capable of next year.

“We want to make sure that every campaign has access to the same sorts of innovation that we had on the Obama campaign and brought forward to the Obama campaign,” said Chris Wegrzyn, co-founder of BlueLabs, the data firm that worked with McAuliffe’s campaign. “Every Democratic campaign should have access to that if they want it.”

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misstated Andrew Bleeker’s title with the McAuliffe campaign. He served as a digital consultant.